


A Matter of Balance

by nearlynoon



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types
Genre: Experiment, Flash Fiction, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-07
Updated: 2018-05-07
Packaged: 2019-05-03 17:53:12
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 986
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14574378
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nearlynoon/pseuds/nearlynoon
Summary: A short conversation between the Grey Jedi Rena and her master.





	A Matter of Balance

She found him in the gathering hall, crouched low to a wall with two pots of paint. He did not turn to greet her, so Rena sat in the corner of the room to watch him as he smeared intricate lines in red and black across the stone, covering a previous mural. At times the marks appeared to resolve into a pattern, then cascade again into meaninglessness. She waited for him to finish, but he continued in silence, unabated.

“Master,” she said quietly at last. “I’ve been thinking. Why do the orders toil against each other so? In the chronicles they seem forever to stamp each other out, only to rise again. Why do they even try, if their attempts can never succeed?”

As she watched his hands move, the pattern resolved. A long red mark painted with his stained thumb had captured the rest of the lines beneath it in a sweeping arc, and the composition was suddenly whole. She leaned back on her hips, trying to take it in at its height, impressed with how it incorporated so much of the surrounding stonework, a madness cleared suddenly into method.

“And?” he croaked, fingers finding the black paint. The blindfold over his eyes was stained where he had wiped his brow here and there. “What do you suppose to be the solution?”

She hesitated. “Perhaps the answer is a matter of balance? There is a medallion in the hall of records, on the podium, like a coin with a black face and a white face. Suppose the orders are like that, the Jedi the white face and the Sith the black? A coin can never have less than its two faces, and maybe the force itself is the same.”

Now the old man’s fingers, coated to the palm in thick black paste, traced a wide course in twos and threes like a wandering river, and the pattern dissolved. It was a jumble of shapes again, like graffiti stacked too many times on itself without painting the wall over. “And what is your evidence for this idea?”

“Well,” said Rena, lying back to ponder the skylight at the room’s peak. “The two are such opposites, aren’t they? Jedi are cold and impassive, and obsessed with loyalty and order. They extinguish their hearts and go away to some blank space in themselves, yet they found their temples everywhere across space to remake the universe in their image.” She rolled on her side, and rested her head on her hand. “The Sith are so different, sometimes happy, sometimes sad, sometimes angry, often eating and drinking and causing horrible pain. They build nothing, and can abide no more than two in the whole universe or else they murder each other within a generation. Even so, neither can gain any sort of upper hand, and even though a Sith lord is defeated every century it seems, and the entire Jedi order destroyed once a millennia, they always return, even if they must be recreated from nothing at all.”

Rena’s master was painting with both hands now, one red and one black. The pattern danced in and out of coherence, veering wildly between beauty and ugliness. Rena wondered how he managed it without eyes.

“So you chalk it up to merely a law of the universe? That both must exist in a world with any life touched by the force at all?” He stood, and wiped his hands on a rag. “The orders think much the same, it is written in all their books and their words and their doings. Each  _ must _ exist, to oppose the other if nothing else. The force itself is a coin, a head and a heart, a palm outstretched and a hand balled in a fist. The universe is so structured! If evil can exist, so must good! If cold blows, so must follow heat! Everything runs in balance,” he gestured at her, “like your medallion.”

He strode over to the basin in the corner and washed his hands at the spigot. Rena pondered the finished mural, which resembled a stone thrown at a wall with tremendous force, caught in the moment of their impact. Order and chaos intermingled equally. It made a powerful kind of sense to her, despite all the meanderings it had taken to reach this point. “ _ Is _ that the answer, master?”

The old man filled a bucket and carried it back to where he had been sitting, and began cleaning the paint from the floor. He did not answer immediately, and when he did it was slow and quiet. “Many creatures inhabit these shining worlds, but we are all afraid. Afraid of the gaps that separate us, that live in our hearts. Afraid of something which happens for no reason, over which not only we have no control but  _ no one  _ has any control. It is easier to imagine the world as a war with battles and victories than to think that nothing has a reason, or worse that everything works perfectly despite how we see it.”

He pointed his sightless face up at the mural he had completed. Its lines and slopes reached as far up the wall as he could reach, some long and imposing, most short, stylistic details. “The world does not teeter on a fulcrum, but by our imagining it does we invent context to our struggles. Who is the watchman without a bandit, and who is a rebel without a tyrant? Yet the world is not a coin, or a symbol or a sheet of paper. It is the round world, with only the single side to its name.”

With that he seized the bucket and splashed the contents across the wet paint, wiping any pattern from it as it ran about in rivulets. Then he turned and strode out of the gathering hall, leaving Rena sitting gazing at the stain as it pooled on the floor.


End file.
